Talk:One Million Monkeys Typing/GA1

GA Review

Passed. Viriditas (talk) 19:28, 31 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Nominator: Bobamnertiopsis (talk · contribs) 14:26, 27 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Reviewer: Viriditas (talk · contribs) 22:50, 29 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Lead

One Million Moneys Typing was a collaborative fiction website

You've got a typo in the lead. One Million Moneys is missing a "k".

Fixed.

More on this: One Million Monkeys Typing was a collaborative fiction website.

I think best practice is to add the material you provide later to this opening sentence. Something like "One Million Monkeys Typing was a collaborative fiction website created by Nina Zito and Ilya Kreymerman that was active from 2007 to 2011."

I've retooled the lead to address both this and the two other points you've raised (parentheticals and the URL).

Brian Richardson in "Introduction. The Implied Author: Back from the Grave or Simply Dead Again?" (2011) uses italics to refer to the subject (One Million Monkeys Typing)

Also true for Drucker (2015). Given these samples, I think it's safe to say that the article title and subject should use italics.

I was 40/60 on this but if we consider the stories on the site to be short works that would definitely be in quotes then I think it's reasonable that the site as a whole would be italicized. Changed.

Link to collaborative fiction in the lead and the body. You and I might be familiar with it, but there are readers who are not.

Done.

Looking at Bugyis (2008), there's a case to be made that the site was sometimes referred to as "1000000monkeys.com" in the past, not only as One Million Monkeys Typing. I'm sure the MOS has directions on this kind of thing, but you should consider adding this to the lead (I know it already appears in the infobox) if it is needed. If you don't think it's necessary and Bugyis was a one-off, then ignore this.

That looks terrible! I’m so sorry for making the recommendation. Please don’t leave it there. :)

Haha, agreed. 86ed.

The site has since attracted scholarly interest for being a rare example of a web-based collaborative writing project that was multilinear (where users wrote branching narratives) rather than linear (where users contributed to a single central narrative).

I like what you've done here very much, but one of my pet peeves in the use of parentheses in lead sections. I think it's fine if you add this to the body of the article, but the lead should attempt to explain this without the parenthetical notes.

Features and operations

Disliked snippets tended to garner no comments or followup snippets of their own, rather than negative critiques from users.

While this seems unsurprising on the face of it, as site users probably didn't want to hurt others, when one thinks about it a bit more, it seems almost unbelievable, given that the negativity bias rules modern social media, to the point where influencers, bloggers, and writers will incorporate and promote errors, controversial statements, and messaging designed to provoke feedback and generate views. In other words, outside the insular writing environment, disliked "stories" garner the most comments and critiques on social media, in an almost complete reversal of the writing model under discussion.

An interesting thought. I suspect that this was the result of two factors: a small and coherent community, and no real method for highlighting 'controversial' snippets. But there's no sourcing to support any of these theories so I think this can be left as is, unless you think something needs changing here.

It's just something I realized when I read it. I think your explanation fits. It was 1) a homogeneous group of people, and 2) the site was short-lived, so there wasn't enough time for factions to evolve like they have on Wikipedia. Interestingly, the site lasted four years. I suspect it took 5-6 years for established factions on Wikipedia to fully evolve, although you didn't really see them emerge as a political force until 2007. I recall when versions of proto-Wikipedia first went live and were accessible on search indexes. There just weren't enough people editing at the time for different groups to arise.

It's fun when an online community is small enough to just stay a unified community, even if that means there's not enough ad revenue to keep the community's platform going long-term.

Reception

Klaiber described One Million Monkeys Typing as a multilinear collaborative hyperfiction project

This was the first thing I thought of when I began the article, so I was surprised to see it in the reception section. I think I understand why you put it here, mostly because you didn't structure the article to put it anywhere else, such as a description section. I'm going to come back to this later, but I did want to note it, as it surprised me. I also sympathize with your placement of it here, as I'm dealing with a similar problem on another article I'm working on right now, and this exact issue came up in my own writing.

Beyond the proposal to put this in another section, such as a "Description", I do note that you neglected to note the additional influence of exquisite corpse, which I was surprised to find no mention of in the article. In your sources, Drucker (2015:88) notes that "One Million Monkeys Typing is a site that describes its activities as "part choose your own adventure, part exquisite corpse".

I tried moving this section around and I like where's it's ended up. I've also added reference to the exquisite corpse, albeit with the caveat that it was the site's own comparison rather than Drucker's.

The site promoted itself as akin to a branching Choose Your Own Adventure story or an exquisite corpse.

It's not or, it's and. See for example Nina's original version. I wonder if this is a generational thing. In the 1980s and 1990s, exquisite corpse was still very popular with the public. The people who put together this website were obviously from that generation and understood the homage.

Great catch, fixed my conjunctions.

References

I cannot confirm any of the information sourced to "An Online Treehouse for Literary Monkeys" by Alissa Wilkinson (July 2008, Paste Magazine) because the article never appeared online (although the article does appear to have been accessible online in a digital edition at one point), it was never archived, and it only survives in the print version.

Note, normally this is not a problem because 9 times out of 10, I'm able to confirm and verify the same info elsewhere. However, there are a few outstanding issues here: 1) This article was created after it was deleted, so the sourcing has to be accessible to some extent and easy to verify given its history on Wikipedia; 2) We have had issues (I know of only one, from 2008) of someone faking an article and bringing it all the way to GAN, where it passed; and 3) I am unlikely to pass an article that I cannot in whole or in large part verify.
Based on what I've been able to find so far, I think it's safe to say that Paste published an article about One Million Monkeys. That's easy to confirm on the OMM archived website, as they mention it. There's also an archived page on the old Paste website that refers to it. However, the part that has me confused is that Alissa Wilkinson is said to have written it, and she's the resident film reviewer, so why is she reviewing a website? I'm not saying it didn't happen, but that struck me as odd.

a, b, c, e) "Ilya Kreymerman and Nina Zito (respectively, a web developer and web designer-and monkeys #1 and #2) were leisurely discussing the integrity of the written word when they hatched the idea to let people write new endings to famous stories. From there the concept spun into writing entire stories collaboratively, with user-defined story arcs and no guarantees for the conclusion. 'We imagined a never-ending, ever-improving text with strong branches freflecting the likes of the niche community that had shaped it—exactly the opposite of the "absolute" nature of print,' Zito says."
d) "...as of today, there are over 600 monkeys. For now, despite the site's growth, Zito and Kreymerman are seeing little financial return ('the banners ads yielded roughly $13 last year')..."
f, g) "Users (lovingly dubbed 'monkeys') graft "snippets" of their own writing onto stories crafted by other monkeys. Snippets range from 50 to 300 words...and each can sprout up to three branches."

Tapscott, Colàs, & Blat (2020) could present an issue as a source since there are elements that are circular, as it cites the old Wikipedia page. Please show that you are citing the authors and not the deleted Wikipedia page.

Cited twice. 1) "Beyond this, there was negligible editorial control over the site's branching stories" is cited to "The editorial control was almost nonexistent and relied exclusively on the site staff." No mention of editorial control is found on the old Wikipedia page. 2) "Alan Tapscott, Joaquim Colàs, and Josep Blat said that the site's "distinctive methodology led effectively to the creation of parallel story worlds, instead of expanding one"." is cited to the exact quoted text. I suppose this is a little similar to the line from the old Wikipedia article "The creators believed that with the addition of ranking snippets and pruning poorly-performing story arcs, a never-ending, ever-improving text would emerge" but I'm most interested in the authors' viewpoint that it was "effective" here; the old Wikipedia article said the site did [a thing] and the cited source argues it did [a sort of similar thing] well.

Regarding Klaiber (2011) in Style, I would add both the link to Style and the JSTOR to help our readers find the sources. I don't think this is required for GAN, but I appreciate the transparency. Here's a copy for you to use:

Klaiber, Isabell (March 2011). "Multiple implied authors: How many can a single text have?". Style. 45 (1): 138–152. ISSN 0039-4238. JSTOR 10.5325/style.45.1.138.

I wish the publisher would actually register the DOI the have publicly listed for this article but in lieu of that I've adopted these two suggestions.

Replies

Viriditas, thanks for the kind and thorough review! I was the user who nominated this one for deletion 16 years ago - it wasn't notable at the time with only the Paste and Utne sources to back it up (and the 2008 version of the article was solely penned by someone whose username was the same as one of the site's creators' names; a likely undisclosed COI). Since subsequent scholarly interest has bumped this into the realm of notability I figured I ought to make a go at bringing it back. I've started in on your suggestions and should be able to make these changes in the next day or two. If you'd like to use the Email User feature to email me, I should be able to respond with the photo I took of the Wilkinson Paste article if you're keen to verify what it says since a lot of the basic info in this article is pulled from there. Let me know if you have an trouble with this. —⁠Collin^{t c} 04:35, 30 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

One way to easily resolve this, is to just provide the text support here. Presently, you cite Wilkinson eight times. So just provide the relevant text that supports the material on this page. That's how we usually do it. Viriditas (talk) 22:36, 30 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Please use the "References" section up above for this. I want to keep the "replies" in that section, so if you can also merge this into that, I would appreciate it. Viriditas (talk) 22:43, 30 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Viriditas, I've taken a stab at addressing each of these points. Please let me know if there's anything I've missed or any further changes you think would improve this article. Again, thanks for taking the time to review this! —⁠Collin^{t c} 23:47, 30 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Criteria

GA review – see WP:WIAGA for criteria

Is it well written?
A. The prose is clear and concise, and the spelling and grammar are correct:
Typos. Fixed.

B. It complies with the manual of style guidelines for lead sections, layout, words to watch, fiction, and list incorporation:
Some confusion about whether subject should be italicized. Fixed.
Is it verifiable with no original research, as shown by a source spot-check?
A. It contains a list of all references (sources of information), presented in accordance with the layout style guideline:

B. Reliable sources are cited inline. All content that could reasonably be challenged, except for plot summaries and that which summarizes cited content elsewhere in the article, must be cited no later than the end of the paragraph (or line if the content is not in prose):

C. It contains no original research:

D. It contains no copyright violations nor plagiarism:
Earwig shows no issues.

Spot checks show no issues

Source request for material fulfilled above.
Is it broad in its coverage?
A. It addresses the main aspects of the topic:
Addresses main aspects.

Doesn't mention the influence of exquisite corpse. Fixed.

B. It stays focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail (see summary style):
Is it neutral?
It represents viewpoints fairly and without editorial bias, giving due weight to each:
Is it stable?
It does not change significantly from day to day because of an ongoing edit war or content dispute:
Stable.
Is it illustrated, if possible, by images?
A. Images are tagged with their copyright status, and valid non-free use rationales are provided for non-free content:
Valid non-free rationale.

B. Images are relevant to the topic, and have suitable captions:
Screenshot of website for historical purposes.
Overall:
Pass or Fail:
An amazing save from Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/One Million Monkeys Typing. Good work. Viriditas (talk) 19:23, 31 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.